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It was a rough weekend for President Biden’s agenda, and the list of villains includes corporate Democrats, the Senate parliamentarian, and the other Democrats who insist on listening to the corporate Democrats and the Senate parliamentarian.
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The biggest problem is that House and Senate centrist Democrats keep scaling back and trying to delay action on Biden’s “Build Back Better” plans, which in turn imperils the bipartisan infrastructure bill that already passed the Senate. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) is the chief footdragger, who says he would like to delay action on Build Back Better until 2022, which would effectively doom it to die in election-year legislative paralysis.
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If they can’t kill Biden’s plans through delay and procedural hardball, though, they will try to weaken them beyond recognition. Sinema reportedly opposes plans that would allow Medicare to negotiate prescription-drug prices directly, which would generate huge savings that Democrats could spend on expanding Medicare benefits or other reforms; Manchin is poised to use his power as chair of the Senate energy committee to weaken Biden’s proposed Clean Energy Performance Program, which would phase out polluting sources of power by paying utilities to provide clean energy, and fining those that continue to source from fossil fuels.
- And on top of everything else Manchin and Sinema are two of an unknown number of Senate Democrats who have decided that Dems must legislate with one hand tied behind their back. On Sunday, the Senate’s parliamentarian advised lawmakers that granting legal status to immigrants isn’t principally budgetary, and thus can’t be included in the filibuster-proof reconciliation bill. In theory, 50 senators and the vice president could ignore this guidance and leave immigration reform in Build Back Better; but Mansinechinma have insisted that their party scrupulously follow Senate supermajority rules, even as the GOP ignores them.
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That all sounds stressful! But maybe they’ll get it together and everything will be back on track by the end of the week?
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One would hope. But leading House Democrats say their reconciliation bill (that is, their version of Build Back Better) won’t be ready until early October. And they’ve already locked in a September 27 vote on the Senate infrastructure bill. If that bill passes the House, centrists will have everything they want and lose their incentive to negotiate out the rest of Biden’s agenda in good faith. That’s why House progressives have promised to vote against the Senate bill en masse until their work on the Build Back Better agenda is done.
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That would put the ball back in the centrists court. Faced with a demand that they play fair, they’ve threatened to take said ball and go home. Sinema and Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-OR) say they'll tank the entire Build Back Better agenda unless the House passes the Senate infrastructure bill on September 27. That is, if they don’t get everything they want, without conceding anything, they will throw Biden’s entire economic agenda in the trash.
Ever since centrists insisted on cleaving Build Back Better in two, the progressive position has been ‘you get your bill, we get ours.’ The centrists have been trying to figure out how to blow up that deal ever since, first by denying progressives any input into the Senate infrastructure bill, then by gutting Build Back Better, and now by taking the whole agenda hostage. If they don’t stop trying to hijack the process behind the scenes, Democratic leaders need to call their bluff.
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The stakes couldn’t be higher as we head into 2022. If we don’t hold the U.S. House and increase the Senate majority, Trump Republicans will take power and the progressive agenda will be all but dead. But with more than a year to go, we can get to work right now supporting organizations in key states working to register voters well ahead of registration deadlines and then have sustained engagement with these voters much earlier than usual which could make all the difference next year.
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The perverse Republican threat to destroy the economy is, even more perversely, increasing the risk that the government will shut down, too. Senate Republicans insist they will not provide any votes to increase the debt limit, and if Congress doesn’t increase the debt limit, the country will default on its financial obligations, wreaking economic havoc. Assuming they’re not bluffing, that means Democrats will have to increase the debt limit on their own. The problem? Ending a Republican filibuster of a debt-limit increase would require 60 votes. Since funding for the government expires at the end of the month, Democrats plan to use an appropriations bill as a vehicle to increase the debt limit. But government-funding bills are also vulnerable to filibusters. That means if Democrats try to call the GOP bluff, Republicans could seemingly filibuster us right into a government shutdown, and then a recession. If Simanchinema need a vivid demonstration of how destructive their pro-filibuster politics have the potential to be, they’re about to get one.
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Tax lawyers at major accounting firms frequently seek jobs at the Treasury Department, so they can make tax-law changes that benefit their former employers, then return to those firms as partners with huge salaries. It’s a practice widely known within the accounting profession, but may now come under wider scrutiny thanks to new reporting from the New York Times. The Times highlighted the case of Audrey Ellis, a PricewaterhouseCoopers attorney who joined the Trump Treasury Department, where, in defiance of ethics rules, she helped create a loophole that allowed real-estate brokers to claim a 20 percent tax deduction on business income—an exemption from the Trump tax cuts that potentially created a multi-billion dollar windfall for her former employer, which hired her back as a partner just a year later. But over the past four administrations, at least 35 accounting-firm employees followed similar trajectories, and 16 were promoted to partner. It’s a particularly egregious form of revolving-door corruption, and may shed light on why so many of President Biden’s Build Back Better proposals to tax the ultra-wealthy, and make sure they don’t avoid the IRS, have been stripped from legislation in Congress.
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